Rocket League: Watch Finale Of MLG's First Tourney

I’ve just finished catching up on the grand final of MLG’s first North American Rocket League [official site] tournament and it was a doozy of a best-of-three!

The MLG eSports organisation have been dipping their toes in the Rocket League waters. It’s mostly because their resident FPS expert and exec producer Chris Puckett is (like the rest of the internet) in love with the game and wants to explore its eSports potential – he thinks it has loads and I’m in agreement. After all, it’s a really easy game to explain to anyone – football/soccer with cars – and has the capacity for really exciting, highly gif-able plays throughout the five minute matches.

You can watch the match after the jump! [Spoilers if you’re working through the whole tournament and don’t want to know who reached the final yet.]

Here are favourites Cosmic Aftershock facing off against Kings of Urban:

Something that I’ve thought while playing my own matches in the tiddler ranks and which became really clear to me over the course of these tournament matches was how effective the in-game crowd chanting is. At live events the crowd joining in with the countdown or the rise and fall of the noise really fleshes out the environment and offers up a baseline of excitement and the sensation of watching with others before you even get started on what the shoutcasters are doing or how the matches are actually going. I love it when you can hear spectator noise while streaming a live eSports event and Rocket League gives a tiny taste of that even if you’re in a silent studio or your bedroom at home. I’m now wondering what would happen if you ran a big stadium event, whether the faux crowd and the real one would harmonise or clash. I think there would be a lot of end-of-game countdowns, at any rate.

But back to this tournament and that ending? I’d say it’s a strong start for a Rocket League professional gaming scene. You could say that MLG really had their eye on the ball getting stuck in so quickly…